[sclug] OS crash whne using flash on full screen mode

[Tom Carbert-Allen]

On 13/07/2010 8:23, Alex Butcher wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Jul 2010, Olivier Lauret wrote:
>
>> Regarding the type of crash, it is a hard crash as if you take the 
>> plug of
>> the socket or you pressed the off button. Could it be related to the CPU
>> which is over heating? As well, the crash doesn't happen all the time is
>> cannot be reproduced all the time with the same flash video. At the 
>> moment,
>> it happens only when viewing a flash video on full screen mode.
>
> Almost certainly not the CPU overheating; modern CPUs should throttle 
> their
> clockspeed when they overheat.
>
>> Could not identify the issue with the links Alex mentioned, but this is
>> probably because I know exactly what I'm looking for.
>
> My money's on a bug in the Intel driver, most likely in its Xv (aka 
> XVideo)
> code, so look at those launchpad entries. Some of them, along with one of
> the respondents here, reported improvements after changing the 
> acceleration
> architecture (XAA, EXA and UXA are the keywords - it changes so much I 
> can't
> keep it straight in my head, and have never needed to tinker)
>
> HTH,
> Alex

It may not be overheating, as this is rare these days as you say (well 
apart from if your ambient case temp is too high. The throttling is only 
based on main gpu temp sensor, the ram could overheat and the card would 
have no idea)
My first thought was power issues certainly match the symptoms: full 
lock up, not reliably reproducible, only in full screen gcard 
acceleration application
What is the hardware? ebay white box special with $5 "gold" PSU? 
Replaced the graphics card with a more powerful one and not changed the 
power supply to match? Connected ALL the power connectors on the 
graphics card? I have seen all those issues in the past cause similar 
problems, although normally when gaming, but full screen video 
acceleration will increase the power consumption quite a lot too. It 
only takes a microsecond of disruption on the power lines to crash most 
motherboards. This normally happens with ati/nvidia cards though, intel 
ones aren't normally meaty enough to draw enough power to cause a 
problem, although I have seen it happen once on an intel card where it 
would work fine in a gcard burn in test but always crash in a certain 
spot in a game (burn in test only did continuous heavy load where I 
suspect it was the spiky load in the game which caused the power supply 
to cry) but a nice new OCZ power supply later and it worked fine with 
the same drivers.
Another thing to check is if any of the caps are bulging or leaking....

TCA